Zephyr Enables Agile Transformation

As development teams become more agile, testing teams must be able to create and execute tests faster, despite their growing complexity. Using Zephyr’s real-time test management solutions, agile, waterfall, and hybrid teams can view changes made to requirements, test cases, assignments, executions, defects, and documents in real-time so they can make faster, data-driven decisions.

“We’ve always focused on test management to solve real problems affecting the testing world,” said Samir Shah, CEO of Zephyr. “Since our 1.0 product we’ve provided intuitive and affordable test management solutions that augment productivity, enhance collaboration, and enable superior manageability.”

Zephyr is now the fastest-growing test management company in the world. Its award-winning test management solutions have attracted more than 3,200 customers in 80 countries in just over two years. And, more than 10 million test cases have been executed using the Zephyr platform.

Zephyr’s real-time solutions transform how development and QA teams of all sizes work, collaborate, and develop higher quality software. With Zephyr, testing teams can take advantage of real-time status updates, avoid buggy software releases, and help ensure ship dates.

Zephyr’s Test Management solutions include Zephyr Enterprise Edition for departments and enterprises with mature processes, Zephyr for JIRA Edition for agile project teams, and Zephyr Community Edition for small teams that want to embrace test management or improve testing in their current project. The company also offers two add-ons: ZAPI and BLuePrints for Confluence. ZAPI connects automation and continuous integration tools to Zephyr for JIRA. With Blueprints for Confluence, testers can create dashboards that include integrated test metrics from Zephyr Enterprise Edition or Zephyr for JIRA. Both ZAPI and Blueprints for Confluence are available from the Atlassian Marketplace.

Enables Smooth Transitions to Agile
Although more development teams are embracing agile practices, testing teams must still test legacy software, often in addition to iterations or sprints.

“Agile transformation is really a journey because testing teams have to finish the testing of legacy software while all of the new products are going down the agile route,” said Shah. “They’re using one set of tools to test legacy products and another set of tools to test agile sprints so they’re duplicating investments and they’re not as efficient as they could be.”

With Zephyr Enterprise, testing teams can manage legacy and agile projects using the same tool. Legacy test assets, including test plans, test cases, test data, and report metrics, can be reused in other legacy projects or newer agile projects, as appropriate.

“We allow enterprise teams to continue to do things the way they’ve always done them,” said Shah. “You can have all of your testing assets in one place, at the same, time using the same UI and data source so you can easily transition to agile, save money, and adopt new practices faster.”

Zephyr Enterprise manages all aspects of software quality. It integrates with various test tools and systems, enables global access and collaboration, and provides management-level visibility. The tool is best suited to enterprises that are running multiple projects in parallel using very structured testing. Its deep integration with JIRA and Bugzilla allows end-to-end traceability.

Zephyr Enterprise Edition, which is available as a download or SaaS, also provides the security and flexibility enterprise teams need. Because it is a multi-tenant platform, it is also ideal for systems integrators and Professional Services groups that want to enable or improve global test delivery management.

The latest edition, Zephyr Enterprise 4.6 improves the way agile testing teams plan and kick off their release cycles by providing insight into estimated text execution time and actual test execution time. The new version also allows an entire release or sprint to be cloned into any other project including its requirements, test cases, mapping, execution cycles, assignments, defect mappings, and attachments. In addition, Zephyr Enterprise 4.6 improves search results using Zephyr Query Language (ZQL).

Take Agile Testing to a New Level
Zephyr for JIRA is a native application built exclusively for the JIRA 5 and JIRA 6 platforms. It enables complete end-to-end project management in JIRA by adding testing to the overall planning, development, bug tracking, and reporting process. Zephyr for JIRA has become popular among project teams that want to integrate testing directly into their JIRA workflow.

“Zephyr for JIRA is working very well for project teams that have adapted to agile ways of working,” said Shah. “It’s nicely integrated with modern agile tools including JIRA, JIRA Agile, Confluence and continuous integration and continuous delivery tools such as Bamboo, Jenkins, Hudson and many others.”

Zephyr for JIRA is the top grossing testing add-on in the Atlassian Marketplace. The latest version, Zephyr for JIRA 2.0, enables the rapid search of test executions using a variety of simple clauses and auto-completion. It also facilitates bulk status updates, copy/move test capabilities between test cycles, and reports that are available in five different formats.

Learn more at www.getzephyr.com.